The Characteristic Time Scale of Cultural Evolution

12/01/2022

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by   Tobias Wand, et al.

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Time series data from the Seshat: Global History Databank is shifted so that the overlapping time series can be fitted to a single logistic regression model for all 18 geographic areas under consideration. To analyse the endogenous growth of social complexity, each time series is restricted to a central time interval without discontinuous polity changes. The resulting regression shows convincing out-of-sample predictions and via bootstrapping, its period of rapidly growing social complexity can be identified as a time interval of roughly 800 years.